Advent 2.8
Mark 1: 1-8
Desert Walks
When | was a newcomer to Philadelphia, traveling here through all the empty
countryside in the central part of the state, | thought about what itis to traverse a wilderness
like the one we have just heard in Mark's gospel. This morning we have done it in the company
of John the Baptizer, the hands-down favorite Biblical figure in the Sunday school classes of my
youth, because he never failed to provoke a reaction; clothed in camel's hair, eating bugs and
wild honey, he was a standout in my classes, preaching alone in the wilderness of Judea. For all
of us, he was invariably voted the least likely Episcopalian we could think of; his dress code was
certainly out of the question, and the wilderness where he preached and baptized was so far
from what any of us associated with worship that was decent and in order that we all felt alittle
lost in trying to find some context for him in our own experience.
Like Luke and Matthew, the beginning of Mark’s good news offers us a messenger
to prepare us for the coming of something great, the arrival of one radically different from the
world we inhabit. But there is not an angel telling a young girl the name of a child to be born to
her, or one appearing in a dream to a young man about to dismiss his wife-to-be. There is
simply a lone figure, preaching repentance, sounding a lot like a man any one of us would avoid
ona street-corner. By comparison with what we hear in the other gospels, he is also
astonishingly short on information: we are to prepare, to ready ourselves for one that is coming,
‘one whose sandals he is unworthy to untie.
So this is the beginning of the good news of the Son of God, not an angel or a
shepherd in sight. But that is precisely why we need John and his abiding strangeness, his
obstinate defiance of any reference to which we could attach him. In the middle of the
wilderness where Mark throws us, itis a mistake to think that we begin on solid footing or that
the terrain will be easy. The starkness of the scene and the deep unknowability of the guide
push us back on the promises of God, of the presence of the divine in the walks through our
‘own deserts as we prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight.
If we are paying attention, the world John occupies is not much different from
‘our own. We too walk a path through the wilderness: ours is from our worship in this place to
the needs of the world. tis this path between contemplation and action, between prayer and
work, that is one of the oldest in our tradition and is no more important than in this season of,
waiting and preparation. itis woven into our identities, is part of who we are and we are
incomplete without making that journey.
Several years ago, | spent some time at an Episcopal Relief and Development site
in northern Honduras, an experience | have spoken about previously. | was with a group that
‘was building a new community, complete with a church, for a number of families that had
previously lived in a row of corrugated iron shacks down by the local river. The work was
decidedly unglamorous, mostly digging ditches and pouring concrete blocks. Before the work
began, though, our group started a walk down a dirt path in ninety-degree heat at eight in the
morning, with small children peering out at us from behind their mothers in the houses that
lined the path. | wondered what they thought of us , odd as we looked, foreigners with our
sunburns, raising our dust-clouds behind us. But we would eventually arrive at a squat, non-
descript building for morning prayer, workers from the community and our rag-tag group of
outsiders, praying the office in English and in Spanish. It was then that the real communal work
began, our time and our relationships being nourished by the time spent in prayer. When | later
received an invitation to the consecration of the church we had helped to build together,concrete with plywood steps leading to the door, | was convinced it was the loveliest church |
had seen.
Glimpses into the kingdom can feel relatively rare, especially in a season marked
by both wonder and cynicism, as this one is. So often we are held hostage by our own
expectations, the reconciliations we hope for, the straightening of relationships that have been
crooked for so long that we hardly remember what they looked lke before they were broken,
But | believe that is also why we need John’s presence among us right now, to prepare us to
witness to something so wonderful that no sane person could have imagined it, to remind us to
pray and to wait so that we can be alive to the kingdom when it arrives, in the face of a guest at
Broad Street Ministries, in the smile of a child at St. Barnabas, in the breathing of the person
sitting next to us.
In that context, repentance, to literally change one’s mind, is about our ability
‘to see the divine in the disorder, to ready our hearts and minds for the unexpected as we move
from the prayer we are cultivating this season to the kingdom for which we are all watching and
working. Itis the ability to see the world as it might be, even as it should be, as we make our
wilderness walks between our prayers and the demands of the world we inhabit.
“Whatever our action,” says the Quaker teacher Parker Palmer, “it can express
and help shape our souls in the world. Whatever our contemplation, it can help us to see the
reality behind the veils. Contemplation and action are not high skils or specialties for the
Virtuoso few. They are the warp and weft of human life, the interwoven threads that form the
human fabric of who we are and who we are becoming.” Like John, we walk our own path
through the wilderness of our own engagement with the world, nourished and directed by the
‘work we do here in this place , the time we spend in our own prayer and worship. Iti in that
journey that we too give witness to the one who is to come.
And we are just beginning. With Mark as our companion this year, we will
constantly be reminded of how little we know of this one who is coming among us. The good
news, the real good news, is that we have the promise of God to sustain us on our paths, who
lifts valleys and makes mountains low as we take our desert walks. Angels may be in short
supply, but the promise is always of renewal, the same renewal we take from this place into a
‘world hungry for the countless gifts we all have. We require no special credentials, no particular
talents, no spiritual acrobatics. All we are asked to do is to drop our expectations, even our
cynicism, and prepare ourselves for something so wonderful our souls could not have possi
imagined it